The sixteenth century brought about a plethora of changes for the Spanish empire
and its conquistadors. They began their conquest of North America as well as their
conquest of Central America (mainly Mexico) when Hernando Cortes traveled to Cuba in
1508. He then sailed to the east coast of a new land, now called Mexico, to conquer the
native Aztec’s and their immense wealth. Alvar Cabeza de Vaca was the first
conquistador, Spanish sailors who were searching for land that could be brought into the
Spanish empire, to travel across the southern tip of North America, into the Gulf of
Mexico and upon his return to Spain, he published a book or an account with full details
as to the climate, topography, and native life (including plants, animals and humans). De
Vaca’s transcript brought immense attention to both New Spain (Mexico) and the New
World (North America). Two conquistadors that followed de Vaca some years later were
Hernando De Soto, who traveled through Florida and became the first European to travel
to and discover the Mississippi, which he had aptly named Rio Grande (the great river).
Coincidently De Soto died on the banks of the Mississippi with fever and malaria (caught
from mosquitoes) in the year 1542. Francisco Vasquez De Coronado, who traveled to
New Spain with Antonio De Mendoza and then set out in search of the seven great cities
of gold (which he never found), was one of the first Europeans to discover the Grand
Canyon, which they thought was at least one mile deep. Although this was not his
original goal, it was quite impressive. The Spanish, mainly Nunez Cabeza de Vaca,
Hernando De Soto, and Francisco Vasquez De Coronado were the first and most
significant North American.
Hernando De Soto was born into a rich family, but from a young age he
knew that he wanted to go and sail, and become wealthy on riches that
have been taken from the New World. De Soto would come across these
riches with his first encounter with the Incas. De Soto was on an expedition
that was headed by Pizarro. They went to Peru in search of gold. When
coming across the Incas, the Spanish realized that to get the gold, they would
have to totally conquer the Incan people. After being promoted to captain of
the cavalry, De Soto was ordered to capture Cajamarca, where the Incan
emperor lived. De Soto, upon his horse, with his men mounted behind him,
approached Cajamarca. The Incan people, never having seen horses before,
never fought back thinking “the Spaniards were gods because they had animals
with silver feet”. The silver feet that they were referring to were nothing more
then the horseshoes. The Spanish then took all of the gold out of the city, killed
almost all of the Incans, and left the rest to die from disease brought over by the
Europeans.
De Soto also had planned to make a port that would enable Spain to trade
with the flourishing market of China. De vaca had talked about a Northern Sea
in his accounts. Upon reading this De Soto set out to build his port here. De
Soto searched for three years, and never found the Northern Sea, or enough
gold to influence other Spaniards to come to the New World. De Soto did
however come across a river the he names the "Rio Grande", but it would later
be renamed the Mississippi River.
De Vaca traveled to the Americas under the command of a man that he
did not always see eye to eye with. His name is Panfilo De Narvaez. Their
ship hit a hurricane off the coast of Cuba. After repairs and re-supplying they
set sail for Florida. They landed around present day Tampa Bay in March of
1528. Here is where disaster began. Narvaez ordered troops
to head inland, while some of the men waited for them in
boats off the coast, hoping to meet them later in the trip. The
land-based soldiers wore out their welcome in the Indian
villages quickly and were chased into the swamp land of Florida where they
had to live off the land, the oysters in the ocean, their horses and in some cases
each other. “Their food was austere in the extreme-some of the nomadic
peoples in this wild region ate insects when there was nothing else”. The men
waiting on the boats became tired of waiting and sailed back to Cuba. Narvaez
and his men then had to battle their way across flordia, through marshy land,
diseases and frequent Indian attacks. Once they made their way to the shore,
the group had been reduced to about 80 men. The remaining men then made
boats out of trrees and horse hide hoping to sail their way back to Cuba. Once
in the ocean, a hurricane developed and blow the rafts back into the shore
destroying them, and reducing the numbers further. Initially the natives
welcomed the Spaniards into their community, but this welcome was also worn
out quickly when, as de Vaca recalled, “half the natives died from a disease of
the bowels and blamed us".. For over four years the number of men slowly
dwindled as they
tried to live in the
complex world of
the natives in
Eastern Texas. The
number of men now was down to four, including de Vaca. The names of the
other three men were Alonso Del Castillo, Andres Dorantes de Carranca and
Estevan (who was an African slave that they brought with them). From here
the three men began to head west and south attempting to reach the Spanish
empire in Mexico. In doing so, these men of the old world to entered into the
New World’s West (west of the Mississippi) and became the first Europeans to
do so. The precise route that they traveled on is not clear, but it is thought that
they traveled through southern Texas and then into Arizona and then into either
Southern New Mexico or the Northern provinces of Mexico, where they were
discovered by a group of fellow Spaniards in July of 1536, over nine years
after they left Spain in Search of land to claim as a possession of Spain. When
the troops found de Vaca and his men he recalled his men as being
“dumbfounded at the sight of me, strangely dressed and in company with
Indians. They just stood staring for a long time". De Vaca returned to Spain,
where he wrote his account of what occurred of the previous 9 years of the
exploration